The Big Dry. George Garland

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      5

      THE MARK OF VICTORIO

      AT ABOUT THE TIME Sack was telling Young this, a courier from Fort Bayard got off his horse at a small outpost southeast of Gila Crossing and asked for Lieutenant Dana.

      “In the castle there,” came the reply.

      The courier looked wise. The long adobe huts surrounded by a hip-high wall of rocks made up Fort Mangus. He knew the joke at Bayard: if an officer offended the high brass they sent him to Fort Mangus. He knew also that First Lieutenant Goodell Dana had done just that.

      Lieutenant Dana met the courier with a semblance of hope in his tight face. The officers’ ball at Bayard tomorrow evening was uppermost in his mind as he broke the seal on the dispatch. Then he was reading the order from General Bent, jaws working into crawling ridges and hard flashes shooting about in his eyes. He was still the high cockalorum of Mangus, for the order said:

       Proceed to Lieutenant Botts’s camp on Gutache Mesa with haste.

      There was more: the General hoped to avoid mounting a full campaign; the Lieutenant should contact a Mr. Joe Sack, who was secretly investigating the Gutache Mesa affair for the Adjutant General of the Territory; the Lieutenant should hold his troop intact on the march, work amiably with Lieutenant Botts until Captain Corday arrived to assume command.

      So it was to be Captain Corday again. Such luck shouldn’t happen to an officer.

      Alone, he glanced at the dispatch again, kicked a chair, and called in a loud voice for Sergeant Reeder, who entered almost at once.

      “As you were, Reeder,” he snapped.

      The Sergeant was big and gaunt, but sullen in Dana’s presence; had been since the Mescalero campaign. But so had others from corporals up to the Colonel, even the General.

      “Troop A is moving up above the town of Bacon. Tonight.” He gave detailed orders about the token force to be left behind and other things, then said, “That’s all, Reeder.”

      But that wasn’t all; his mind was ticking over slowly with reports out of Bacon and Queeny. Conditions were none too good up there. What with the lawlessness and flowing whisky, it was small wonder that more Indians didn’t hit the warpath. Horses were being stolen and cabins burned. The military overlooked these small things.

      And now two prospectors had died with burning arrows in them. Five in each. Somehow, Dana felt it, the Army was in for more than it realized.

      A little later, Troop A hit the saddle, jogged out, pushed stolidly north toward the Gila River through the sheen of night, carbines laxed, yellow neckerchiefs dim in the starlight. A glum outfit that looked ahead to saddle sores and the eternal chase of an enemy who wasn’t there. This was the Mangus troop. The General was a benevolent man.

      The General knew the Army, but not the Apache. From Colorado, he was tame-minded, Ute and Arapahoe influenced.

      Dana rode at the head of the column, looking straight ahead, thinking of the past, never forgetting that he was in a rut, long steps from promotion. He had won disfavor in the Mescalero campaign a few months back because he led his men into a trap, lost a dozen, and, most of all, because he had been right in the strategy that finally saved Troop C and the battle. But he had been dressed down because he failed to run when Captain Corday’s trumpeter bounced retreat off the crags. That was the Army. Better to be wrong and obedient than win a victory against orders.

      Though he wasn’t the kind to smart under yesterday’s discipline, blame for a scout’s error went against the grain. Young West, the scout, was on the peak late one afternoon looking at White Moon’s war party, at Corday’s and Dana’s. He was there heliographing Corday, telling him of the line of march of White Moon and Dana. But Corday marched on away from the trap he, Dana, had planned. Toward dawn, West rode up and said the attack would come from the south. It didn’t. And when Corday’s trumpet blew retreat there was no place to go.

      He wouldn’t forget this Young West.

      That campaign was the close past. This one, if it could be called that, lay ahead, up and over weary miles of cactus, yucca, and parched land, up in the manzanita perhaps; all because two prospectors tempted Victorio’s braves and died with five arrows in each of them.

      Prospecting, the intelligence said. But was it something else? Somebody was cunning and sharp up at Queeny or Bacon. Was it guns and liquor? It stank even as it smelled Apache and a man held his nose and he didn’t; he got used to it, like he did dust. But where white men gathered there was Indian trouble. They lied and cheated and nobody’s word was good.

      The hell with it, he shot back into the empty night.

      The officers’ ball was tomorrow night and the pretty McQueen girl would be there. Bonnie had smiled at hero Corday. And tomorrow night while Corday danced with her, he would be lying flat of his back gazing up at empty stars with smells of sweat and leather in the air instead of Bonnie’s perfume.

      But that was a hot-head’s fate. A lieutenant until they broke you for more hot-headedness. Ten years of it, he, Senator Tom Dana’s boy from Virginia, kicked out of school early for the sweet little temper he humored. He should have red hair, though it was brown and wavy. He should own a pair of beady gray eyes, but they were soft and brown. He was fashioned a contradiction.

      He fell back to the column. “All right, Sergeant Reeder. This isn’t quite the time to show trail-lousy. The General said, ‘with haste.’ ”

      Sergeant Reeder said something, inarticulate though conforming. Dana didn’t hear what he said next—“Bastard of a loo-tenant!” He was thinking of Bonnie McQueen again, seeing in memory a woman with life in her fine face and figure. She challenged all men. Only one would win her. And hadn’t he as much right to dance with her at Fort Bayard as the other officers? He had, though General Bent thought otherwise.

      “Proceed with haste,” he scowled into the night. What the General meant, actually was:

       On to Gila, Mr. Dana, but don’t stop there. Go on up where it’s dry and hot and desolate. Smell dust and look at beargrass and yucca and rocks as they saw into the flesh and bruise you. Shake out your boots, if you ever take them off, Mr. Dana—if you can—there might be a whip scorpion in one of them. Dry poison, Mr. Dana.

      It was the Army. He hated it, loved it; all one hundred and eighty-five pounds of his five feet and eleven inches was used to it and all that it could hand a man from battle to promotion, to the Sixty-Fourth Article of War.

      He rode down the line and prodded his men awake. He cursed and turned his head north again, oblivious to the stars, the slow shuffle of hoofs, or the distant wail of a coyote. A light far ahead appeared on a mountain slope. It went out. Another sprang up. Before morning, Victorio would know how many troopers were on the march up to the ’Frisco Valley. It was uncanny, but it was so.

      For a moment he was wondering if the five arrows in each of the prospectors on Gutache Mesa were meant to convey something.

      A shiver ran up his spine.

      Toward noon next day, Lieutenant Dana rubbed his grim face with a gauntleted hand and halted his troop. A big Queeny freight wagon drawn by six mules ground to a halt. The grizzled old wagoner spat tobacco juice and spoke of the Gutache killings:

      “Danged СКАЧАТЬ